Did they ever get the renderer on par with Photoshop? Every png I rendered with Affinity looked like shit but this was years ago.

> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

I'm running Affinity Studio on my Mac. Every time I run it, Little Snitch shows that it is transferring data to many servers, such as serifservices.com, canva.com, onetrust.com, amazonaws.com, sentry.io, ..

I've tried to set privacy preferences to maximum, but it hasn't helped. Am I the product? The old Affinity Designer 1 doesn't send any data to servers, so I'm still using it instead of the new app.

Does it still work when you block all outgoing connections?

Yes, but I don't want to start tweaking my firewall to run it.

Not only this, but it's like Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign all mixed up into one super-app. This beats Adobe's cross-app functionality by miles.

It actually used to be paid. I paid for Affinity Designer when it came out first, then Affinity Photo. I didn’t pay for the publishing software since I was too deep into TeX. But at that time they promised that they would never become subscription software like Adobe and that message was part of the reason I bought it. I liked and still like perpetual licenses.

Affinity would be a great clone of PS, they copied it up to 90%. But for the last 10%, they were like, you know what? Let's do it in a way that it will make no sense to someone who has used PS for decades. I remember if you wanted to have a transparent background for your file, you had to CREATE the file SPECIFICALLY to have a transparent background. In PS, you just deleted the default white background, and bumm, you had a transparent background. I'm pretty sure PS behaved like this since - at least - PS 4 (not CS4). That last 10% has these idiocracies.

Agreed, too often you would search “how to do x photoshop thing but in affinity” cause it was so unobvious

Agree. Affinity is better than nothing, but has some really really stupid design choices.

> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

Not true since requires you to sign in with Canva account.

Which is entirely free.

I paid for the entire Affinity suite in one shot, was worried when Canva took over, but glad to say everything's working together just fine.

When you say "everything's working", have you updated since Canva took over? I haven't, after happily paying for the whole suite every time they gave me a chance. Just wary. At some point, not being a profit center for Canva, the app is going to get more exploitative.

The legacy apps have been receiving minor updates along with the new Affinity app.

"Everything is working" was meant to imply my legacy flow as well as the new flow haven't broken at all.

I'm sure that in a year or so Canva will move to a subscription model. Then we'll see.

Free (as in beer). There's always a catch.

Though, it's success does make me wonder if a GIMP based editor with a similar interface would work well

I read on Twitter this week that someone made such an interface on top of GIMP.

https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp

Yeah, there have been similar things before it as well. I was thinking more of a ground up photoshop style editor with GEGL as the backend

Never did understand why gimp's ui isn't a Photoshop clone, or more broadly, why there isn't one canonical Photoshop clone like libreoffice is to Ms office.

> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

How is this sustainable for a for-profit entity? How do they pay the bills/developers?

Presumably though Canva subscriptions?

Shame it's only Mac/Windows compatible. I'd kill for a Linux build.

There's a community of folks maintaining some WINE tweaks to make it work! Thankfully, it's mostly just config options so nothing additional to install/run beyond WINE. I tend to use the V2 suite and on a mac, but I've got Affinity V3 installed on my ubuntu dev machine and had no issues with it when I've needed it.

https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux

Awesome. Have starred the repo and will have a look through it later tonight when I'm done with work.

Maybe use WINE or similar to run the Windows build?

True, that's an option, but a native build would be optimal